The Houseguest and Other Stories - Amparo Dávila

Amparo Dávila was born in 1928 and started publishing short stories in her native Mexico in the 1950s. Quite well known in her home country, Dávila has largely been overlooked in the West. “The Houseguest”, published in 2018, is the first collection of her short stories translated into English. In these twelve stories, you will meet Mexican women struggling with paranoia, obsession and fear. While the supernatural plays an important role here, the lives of these female protagonists are already quite horrid before any otherworldly creatures appear, as they have to face indifferent husbands or suffocating families. Reminiscent of Kafka or Julio Cortázar, the stories are beautifully crafted nightmares that will leave you doubting the boundary between fantasy and reality.

Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila’s stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted—you’ll finish each one gasping for air.

With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest—Dávila’s debut collection in English—you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.

Translated from the Spanish by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson

Awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 1977
Honored with the Medalla Bellas Artes in 2015.

"Each of these stories is equal parts Hitchcock film and razor blade: austere, immaculately crafted, profoundly unsettling, and capable of cutting you. Amparo Dávila is Kafka by way of Ogawa, Aira by way of Carrington, Cortazár by way of Somers, and I’m so grateful she’s in translation."

—Carmen Maria Machado

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